Africa Got Talent That Only Africa Alone Can Sell

May 23, 2018

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When I wrote this content about Africa Needs Online Content from Africa by Africans, I got a lot of reactions from it and thought I should talk more about and bring out the valuable contributions I got from fellow Africans and those who were born in Africa. Indeed, Africa got talent that we have to sell to the entire world.

The greatest comment contributors came from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana. This was not surprising to me because these countries usually appear top in Africa for content about Africa.

Opinions about the topic differed a lot, with Ghanaians and Nigerians accepting that Africa needs more content from Africa. There were some mixed fillings from South Africa about the topic. Most did not accept but when we discussed more, they turned to understand the point where I was coming from.

Why Wait for Content About Us to Come from Outside? Africa Got Talent

Let me just give you this one example. In Cameroon, we have Silicon Mountain, Cameroon’s equivalent of Silicon Valley. You know what I am talking about. Most of the techpreneurs and young entrepreneurs from Cameroon were groomed at Silicon Mountain. Even me writing, I am an offspring from there even though by then it was not called Silicon Mountain.

Cameroonians actually knew about it when BBC and other western media carried out documentaries on what is happening there. Where were our own numerous media houses? Even our National Media came in only when they got viral news on the Internet from those documentaries. Do we need to wait for others to write our own stories before we come in? That I say no. I am very sure many of you are learning about Cameroon’s Silicon Mountain today. However, the much I can do to let you know more about it is by referring you to the various documentaries I am talking about.

Africa Got Talent! We have our own Bill Gates, Zuckerbergs, Linus Tovalds in our midst but we don’t talk about them. Nobody will know they exist until we tell their stories. Telling their stories will make the world know about them. This will give them some publicity and someone somewhere will check on them. Someone somewhere will buy their products or ask for their services. The talent is there, but if it remains in the eggshell, no one will know the contents.

I could understand South Africans well. Content is very much available for South Africa online, that’s the reason why people from that region could not believe me. Government websites are active and updated frequently, people put up content to sell their products, ideas, etc. I used this keyword “Content writing for Afr” and the Google suggestion for it was “Content writing South Africa”. That is what happens when you are searching for keywords from Africa. This is to tell you that the world knows more about South Africa than Africa. This means South Africa has a lot of content online than other parts of Africa. Reason why some of my audience from South Africa found it difficult to accept that Africa lacks content online.

Checkout Sub-Sahara Africa and you will see that very little content is coming from there. Even government websites are non-functional. Information is lacking. It’s difficult to find out information on certain countries. Information should be the cheapest thing in this digital world we are living in today. If we don’t put the information, no one will know.

Did I Mean Content Should Come Only from Africans?

When I say content from Africa by Africans for Africa, I don’t mean others should not write about Africa. One of my readers made mention of the fact that he was born in Africa and he is white. He asked if what I am saying is that he should not write about Africa because he is not from Africa. I am in no way saying that content should come only from Africans. What I am trying to encourage here is that Africans should get up to the task and write content about themselves. We should not only wait for others to tell our own stories for us because they will do so based on how they see it and not how we Africans see it. Another thing is that most of them, when writing, Africa is not their audience. So they don’t write for Africa.

Making Money Out of Content

There is the issue of making money out of blogging or writing content. Some took what I said for the Google Adsense-like money. I was far from that. I am also far from the gossip blogs. There are many ways to make money other than drawing traffic to your content depending on some ads that you got to work hard for to earn a cent. The real money comes in when you have something to sell. Your blog doesn’t need hundreds of views, but an audience that matters. Sell highly researched content to bring in quality traffic on your content. That’s what matters. Create well researched content and sell. There are a lot of things to write on out there that many people will want to hear about and pay just to get it.

Investors are looking for such content because Africa is becoming (if not already) the center of business in the world. The moment I started writing investment contents like Starting a Business in Cameroon – What It Takes, Cameroon Personal Income and Corporate Taxation or Why You Need to Invest In Cameroon, I realized that traffic on my blog started increasing without me sharing. Checking on statistics, these three articles brings in constant traffic on my blog without any promo. I am now carrying a research on the above topics to produce an investment guide which I will have to sell out. That’s one of the ways you can make money out of content writing. I will be sharing with you in another post how you can write and sell content without depending on Adsense and other paid ads. Most content writers or bloggers in Africa depend on paid ads for income.

Creating Content for Africans by Africans is a Great Way Forward

One of the greatest achievement I got from this post is that one of my readers took a decision to start a YouTube Channel which is a great thing. Learn how to create a YouTube Channel for Africa. When we talk of content, we do not limit it to text content. Content includes text, video, audio, graphics and motion graphics.

This is what one of my readers wrote which I found it just so good and encouraging. It was to me one of the best comments on this.

“Sounds good. But you have to show that you can make real money off that method (selling well researched content). Once you can show that, you will have tons of people doing it too. You should probably focus on making the content you produce successful, and then the rest will come automatically – that’s usually how this stuff goes. It might seem like you can get a couple more people involved by doing free training, but in the long run it’s probably better to use that time and energy to push your research forward to where you can hire people. It sounds selfish, but it really isn’t in the long run as creating that kind of knowledge center and proof of success can be massive in pushing people into the career.”

That’s just what I would be doing from now on. If you want to be trained on writing content for Africa, get in touch with me. For now, I wont be organizing training sessions on that again. People tend to listen more to actions they see than see something coming out from what they hear.